Some Oxford-educated English man claims in his blog that China should use an alphabetical writing system, and China’s failing to do so in history partly resulted in the high level of illiteracy. He goes like this：
[China failed to invent stuff] Like an alphabet. Really, how hard is that? The Koreans managed to transform their character-based system into a very serviceable syllabic alphabet nearly 600 years ago. Amongst the reasons why China still hasn’t achieved a high level of literacy….
It is not the first time westerners point a finger at Chinese culture and claiming it backward, outdated or lacking creativity. Well, China has to ‘disappoint’ them for yet another time, because China will never use an alphabetical writing system. Koreans designed their square-shaped writing system, Vietnamese reverted from Chinese characters to French alphabets after being colonized and Japanese are using half-Chinese and half-syllables. But these examples do not mean that China, the inventor of its unique writing system, will follow suit just because an Oxford man can’t learn it.
The reason is very simple: Chinese writing system is part of Chinese culture, and it has been a very stable and mature writing system over the past 2,000 years. Its earliest appearances date back to 1,000 B.C. A remarkable treasure of cultural heritage has been preserved by this consistent writing system, and this is part of the reason that Chinese conquered the barbaric conquerors from the North. To claim that China should discard its unique writing system is tantamount to a cultural genocide, something western colonists excelled at. Just look at the whole American continent!
The writing system of Chinese, in all its uniqueness, perpetuated and preserved our culture. It is China itself in one sense.
The value of Chinese writing system aside, I am going to explain in simple words why Chinese are actually easier to learn than English and other major European languages:
- Chinese grammar is an ideational grammar. It is very straightforward with an intense focus on ideas rather than grammatical forms which are commonplace in European languages. Translated literally, Chinese goes like this: I EAT-le THREE APPLE. No conjugation and no plural form. To express a past tense just add the universal “le” at the end of the verb. The plural form of APPLES is semantically redundant because the word THREE said it all. The economy of grammatical forms and the focus on ideas make Chinese simple to learn yet powerfully expressive, a hallmark best exemplified by Chinese poems.
- Chinese uses symbols very efficiently, and knowing about 3,000 Chinese characters is more than enough to read extensively in modern China. Ideas rarely exhaust the combination of a few thousand everyday Chinese characters, and a learned person in China is not judged by how many characters he knows. To read extensively in English, one would learn about 20,000 words to say the least. A simple example is suffice to show the difference : In English you say January, February, March etc, but in Chinese you simply say Month 1, Month 2 … I have been learning English for over ten years and I still come across new words more often than not. While Americans have to take the GRE test to enter graduate schools, Chinese students are poring over English glossaries in order to pass the qualifying English test for a master’s program in Chinese Literature. What an irony.
- Contrary to the widespread superstition that Chinese characters are difficult to write, writing a Chinese character is not difficult at all. Even a Gecko caveman can do it. Sounds too good to be true? Just install Microsoft Pinyin on your computer, change into Chinese language input method, and type “woaizhongwen” without the quotation marks. Do you see it? You have just written 我爱中文 which means I love Chinese language. Admittedly, it takes some training to write Chinese characters by hand, but it is not difficult for Chinese kids at all. It is in their blood, remember? Besides, fewer and fewer Chinese write by hand today because typing characters into a computer screen is so easy and fast.
Ignorance of a foreign culture is always pardonable, but passing judgment about a country’s writing system with quarter-knowledge passes for stupidity.
@Froog, I’ll reply to your list of our debate questions tomorrow. I had a busy day and I need to relax a bit. You know I can’t write English as fluently as you do. Indeed I thank you for visiting my site and spending time for this discussion. But that doesn’t mean I agree with you
@Ryan, you are absolutely right about the historical facts, but I am afraid you misunderstood me. Please allow me to rephrase:
1) Chinese culture is a result of the constant interaction with the cultures from boarding nations and ethnic groups. Chinese learned a lot from these peoples and some of these peoples accepted Chinese culture and became Chinese.
2) I meant to say: although China was conquered by the nomadic/roaming people from the north in history, it actually incorporated/assimilated these people into a bigger China because of its advanced civilization. This is what I meant by conquering the barbaric groups with Chinese culture, and the Chinese writing system is part of its culture.
Qing Dynasty, established by Man People, is a case in point. Now it is almost impossible to tell a Qing person (the conqueror) from a Han Chinese (the conquered).
Ah, yes. That is a good point, and I did misunderstand you. Han assimilation, for better or worse, is unrivaled.
BTW: Your tab order for the form inputs is a bit out of whack for anyone using tabs instead of a mouse to fill out the “Leave a Comment” info. If you try and tab from Name to E-mail it jumps up to the search bar at the top of the sidebar. Sorry, off-topic, but wanted to let you know.
Ryan,
Thank you for letting me know the bug. I never noticed it before. I’ll contact the theme designer.
Hi Ryan, the bug is now fixed. Thank you very much for letting me know.
I already listed what I see as the impracticalities. Every character must be memorised individually: its appearance, its meaning, its pronunciation, and how to write it. That is much harder than learning an alphabet system and a few rules of spelling, which then give you ready access to learning an almost unlimited number of words (and being able, usually, to immediately know how to pronounce them even if you’ve never heard them, and often even being able to infer their meaning). Chinese characters are hard to learn, hard to write, and hard to remember if you don’t use them regularly. And far more time is devoted to learning the native language in China than in almost any other country in the world, because of these difficulties; it leeches time away from other studies at school. National literacy rates are still low in China (not just because of the writing system, of course, but I believe it doesn’t help); and even amongst those who are well-educated, the level of literacy is often fairly limited – I frequently encounter Chinese who fail to recognise many characters even in fairly simple books and newspapers. That’s quite a lot of impracticality, there. (And that’s without getting into the issue of making your country more welcoming and accessible to foreigners. Visitors can find their way around easily in any country that uses the Roman alphabet, but in a country like China…. We’re now seeing pinyin appear on road signs all over China, and there’s a lot more English on food packaging. I think this will also tend to undermine the position of the traditional Chinese writing system: it won’t seem as ‘easy’ to learn, or as necessary, when you’re no longer in a monolingual environment.)
Yes, that second point was a hypothetical one. I was not asking whether you thought the CCP would or should introduce such a policy, but whether you thought they could, if they chose to do so. You say NO? Do you really think the level of resistance to change in the written language is so strong that the people would defy the government? That would be interesting to see. It’s possible, I suppose. But I’m not sure that’s really what you meant; I think you may have not been attending to the question closely enough, and were just responding that you didn’t think the CCP would ever try to do this anyway.
How many Chinese have complained to me how much they suffered at school in learning Chinese, particularly in first learning to write the characters? I haven’t kept records. I would say probably about 98% of everyone I’ve ever talked to about it. And that’s many hundreds now. Not a comprehensive, scientific, nationwide survey, to be sure; but not an insignificant sample, either.
Tang and Song poetry may be more accessible because it’s short and fairly straightforward. Heck, I can read some Tang and Song poetry. But I have been repeatedly told by my students that The Four Classics are fairly remote from contemporary Chinese, and quite heavy going.
Good answer on the handwriting point, but….. Yes, you can still force children to learn to write the characters in school. But children start to use computers at an early age now, and so will be doing a lot of their writing in pinyin. I think it’s not inconceivable that the gaokao might go online in a few years. Even if it never does, even if children still have to learn to write characters in school so that they can take a handwritten university admission exam, the fact that so much of the time they are just writing – and thinking – in pinyin is bound to make it harder to learn (and easier to forget) the characters. And once they’ve finished university, they may never need to write by hand again. I’ve almost forgotten how to hold a pen – we live in a keyboard culture now. And if people are using pinyin, or some other Romanized system, to write all the time, it will make it harder for them to read characters; it will reduce the need for them to read characters.
(And yes, you should say “I use English more than Chinese.”)
It’s difficult to compare the relative ease of learning languages – there are so many differences between one person and another; and so much depends upon what is your first language, and how similar or dissimilar is the second language you are trying to learn. However, I think it is certainly true that most native English speakers find Chinese quite hard to learn, compared to another European language (most reasonably bright and and motivated students could probably get up to quite a good conversational fluency in French, for example, in 2 or 3 months in an “immersion” environment. In China, it seems to take at least two or three times as long – if not more – and a lot of that is down to the writing system. Everyday spoken Chinese is pretty easy to learn, but the reading and writing is exceptionally hard). Also, though I don’t have citations on hand for you, I believe cognitive scientists who study language acquisition will mostly support my contention that alphabet-based writing systems are much easier, less stressful and less time-consuming to learn.
John and Ryan only seem to support you in questioning whether pinyin can work as a substitute. I can’t now remember the name of it, but I’m sure there was a Romanized system developed in the early 1900s which attempted to represent the tones using letters as well (I believe there are still some survivals of that system today, e.g. Shaanxi). Criticisms of pinyin usually seem to be based on the fact that it doesn’t show tones. I don’t know if tone marks are integral to pinyin or not; but of course the character system could only be replaced by pinyin PLUS tone marks (or by a system which could represent the tones effectively by spelling). Ryan is also concerned that Chinese has a confusing number of perfect homophones (even when the tones are considered). Well, yes, that’s always been one of the weaknesses of the language, but it has evolved ways of coping with this: there’s no reason why a character-free written language should be any more (though perhaps no less) unintelligible than the spoken language. It’s my belief that the unwieldy profusion of homophones in Chinese is at least partly the result of the difficulty (impossibility) of representing pronunciation through characters. I would hope that a good Romanization system could allow the language to grow and change, to represent more subtle differences of pronunciation enabling some of these homophones to be differentiated.
Almost every other language in the world ditched pictographic systems of writing thousands of years ago in favour of alphabets, and they have benefited from this. I think Chinese would too.
Don’t you think it’s rather “culturally imperialistic” of you to demand that other people learn Chinese?
I’d love to learn Chinese, but life’s too short. And it’s hard to find the motivation to learn a language that’s only spoken in one country (well, yes, a few other places as well; but it’s only the primary language in one major country), that uses a perversely hard-to-learn writing system that (in my opinion) is probably about to die out, and where everybody is learning English anyway. Honestly, I’m busy with Spanish and Arabic.
Ha…Isn’t this true for English words as well?
A few thousand common Chinese characters AND their combination do the same job. You don’t need to learn 20,000 characters to read extensively, as you do with English. Please, don’t confuse alphabets with characters. A character in Chinese equals to an English word. Do you ever get it?
The same is true for Chinese. Chinese characters use radicals widely. Any Chinese character is comprised of radicals and characters are grouped in dictionaries by their radicals. People learn the radicals to memorize the ‘word’.
Nope. pinyin represent tones very well. There are too many similar sounding Chinese words for pinyin to efficiently represent them. This is the very reason that pinyin will NEVER replace Chinese characters.
You still haven’t answered my question: Do those Chinese think it is actually easier to learn English than Chinese? Do they ever complain about how hard it is to learn English and pass examinations? They must have had one too many. Ask them which one is more difficult next time, and see if they claim learning 20,000 English words is easier.
Wrong. Chinese writing system today is not pictographic by all means. It is a system of symbols, not ‘pictures’. Upon its earliest appearance and development, Chinese writing system did carry some pictographic elements, but it is no longer the case for modern Chinese.
I suggest you to learn some Chinese because you know so little about it and you don’t have much evidence to back your claims up. All you have is hearsay and your own imagination. It is actually culturally imperialistic for you to advocate ditching a country’s writing system completely while not possessing one iota of knowledge about it. Isn’t it ridiculous?
@Thinkweird: Regarding the bug – cool
@the conversation: I think what is being misrepresented in this argument is the benefits of both languages.
Thinkweird, you’re absolutely right that Chinese characters do offer some insight into their pronunciation through radicals – a fact that I didn’t know until I started learning Chinese at a Chinese university, but that most good texts will teach as well.
However, when you say that English words also need to be memorized individually for appearance, meaning, pronunciation and how to write it, this isn’t so. English words are, largely, not memorized the same way Chinese needs to be. Having taught a good amount of ESL previously, I remember all too well how Chinese students tried to (and continue to, I’m sure) apply their own learning styles (namely rote memorization) to English, and struggle with it – never realizing that the key to English spelling/pronunciation isn’t by looking at each word as an individual image to memorize, but through understanding alphabet-based phonetics as building blocks for the words. A word isn’t a symbol, as in Chinese, it is a series of sounds joined together.
Reading both arguments, you both have valid points, but both seem to be arguing your points with cultural blinders on.
The one thing that is very relevant from Froog’s points is the amount of time that students are required to devote to being literate. I’m certain it’s not the sole reason, but I do wonder if it’s why students in North East Asia, all countries using Hanzi in some form, are required to spend so much additional time in class to achieve similar scholastic results as students in countries without such a complex writing system.
The interference from one’s mother tongue is natural when learning a foreign language. How strange is that? I am sure Chinese students struggle so more their English courses than with Chinese characters.
Same scholastic results? Chinese students are generally better in math than U.S. students from the same age group. And they are not spending the extra time on learning Hanzi because English has taken so much of their time.
Blame Asian students’ diligence on Confucius, highly competitive college entrance tests, cultural tradition to emphasis on studying, but not on learning Hanzi.
Incidentally, I believe the system of Romanization that Froog is talking about is called Gwoyeu Romatzyh – and it is pretty cool.
Oh, yes, that could be it. Thanks for the reminder, Ryan. I was reading about that a few months ago, but I can’t remember why or where.
TW, yes, I understand what characters are, and how they work. Radicals sometimes – but, I think, not always – give you a guide to pronunciation, assuming you know how to pronounce the radical. But no Chinese characters show how they should be pronounced in the way that alphabet systems do; you have to learn how to pronounce them in the first place via pinyin or phonetic scripts. Radicals and other common character components may give some guide to meaning as well, but it’s not very clear or unequivocal. And working out the meaning of character-combinations is very challenging – a lot of them seem pretty obscure or counter-intuitive. Another aspect of English that Chinese learners rarely seem to grasp is the significance of morphology, that the structure of a word can usually tell you know only what part of speech it is but what other words it is related to and – sometimes – what its meaning is (even if you’ve never seen the word before).
There are, I gather, something over 40,000 different hanzi (rather more, I know, in the canonical Kangxi lexicon, but I understand that many of those are obscure variants of the same basic forms; 40k seems to be the number most commonly quoted for Chinese these days), but only around 10,000 of these are in “common use”. I’ve also seen estimates of between 80,000 and 120,000 for the number of Chinese ‘words’ formed by character combinations, but again fewer than half of these are deemed to be in “common use”. It’s pretty much impossible to count the number of words in English. Estimates usually go somewhere around 2 million. Many native speakers have effective vocabularies – at least, passive vocabularies: able to recognise a word or intuit its meaning when it’s read or heard) of well over 100,000 words. And you know what – I can read ANY of those 2 million words, and have a fair idea how to pronounce most of them, and make a stab at guessing the meaning of a very great number of them. They are ALL, to some extent, accessible to me. That is the great advantage of an alphabetic system over a character-system (and yes, I know hanzi is a modified pictographic system, rather a pictographic system proper, and I think there’s a special technical term for that – but it slips my mind at the moment, and it’s really not important).
A further advantage of alphabetic systems is that it is very easy to adopt words from other languages, to create new words, and just to make up nonsense words for fun. Do you know Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’? I suspect not – there’s no Chinese translation, I think: it wouldn’t be possible.
The pinyin used on road signs doesn’t include the tone marks, but that doesn’t seem to cause any problems. I have encountered a number of Chinese who suggest that pinyin means Romanized-Chinese-without-tone-marks, and is thus completely useless for representing characters. If pinyin represents pronunciation and tone adequately, then why not see if it could work as an alternative to character-writing? If you say “Oh, but there are so many homophones, you can’t possibly understand Chinese without having unique symbols for each word”, I think you’re coming at the problem BACKWARDS. If Chinese has so many homophones that it is difficult or impossible to understand (and this is frequently a problem with the spoken language), then I would suggest that what you need to do is cut down on the number of homophones – not necessarily by abandoning words, but by differentiating the pronunciation. As I suggested in my last comment, the limitation of the character-system in expressing pronunciation has probably led to a lack of variety and flexibility in Chinese standard pronunciation. There is, however, a huge amount of variety in actual Chinese pronunciation, not just between the major regional accents and dialects, but even between individuals living in the same place – a variety which cannot be recorded or expressed in characters. If you had a writing system that could reflect that kind of variety of pronunciation more accurately, I think many of your homophones need not be homophones any more.
Everyone finds it harder to learn a second language than their native language. Chinese find learning a second language particularly hard, because their own language is so different from most other languages. Also, language teaching in China tends to be very, very poor. It’s improved quite a bit in the last decade or so, but it’s still pretty bad.
Many of the Chinese I know who’ve attained a really high level in their English say that they no longer find it hard to study. A good many of them say that they actually prefer using English to Chinese, because it gives them more subtlety and flexibility of expression.
I think “cultural imperialism” is a tired, overused phrase. I was making fun of it back there. It tends to be used as a knee-jerk fenqing defence: “Oh, you think you’re better than us, you think your language is better than ours, you think your writing system is better than ours, you think your pop music is better than ours, you just want us all to become Americans….blah, blah, blah.” Here’s the thing: culture is essentially non-national: it transcends borders. And it isn’t rigid, it is constantly evolving. If I were aggressively advocating that the Chinese abandon something that is distinctively “Chinese” in favour of something that is “non-Chinese”, purely for my own satisfaction, to assert the superiority of “my own” culture or exert the influence of my nation, then that, I suppose, might fairly be termed “cultural Imperialism”. If, for example, in colonial times, Chinese schools were banned, and education was only supposed to happen in English (or French or Russian or whatever); or if xiangqi were outlawed and everyone was expected to start playing ‘Western’ chess instead – yes, that would be “cultural Imperialism”.
But the Roman alphabet is not associated with any one nation or culture. It is used worldwide. And the pinyin system for using it represent the Chinese language was developed in China under the direction of the CCP government. What’s more, I am not suggesting the adoption of pinyin in place of characters just to make myself feel good or to try to imply that ‘the West’ is somehow better than China. I merely observe, as a student of linguistics, that I think such a change is likely to happen at some time; and I express the belief, the hope that it would, on balance, be a good thing for the Chinese language, and for the Chinese education system.
I’m not saying, You must do this, because I’m better than you; I’m saying, I think you should do this, because it would be better for you. That’s not imperialistic; paternalistic, maybe, but not imperialist!
By your own numbers, which one is more difficult to learn? English.
You are constantly using ‘many Chinese” or “a good many of them” to backup your claim. I really doubt the actually numbers. You are not only saying one is more fluent with a foreign language than his mother tongue, which runs counter to common sense, but also imperialistically hinting Chinese has less “subtlety and flexibility of expression than English”.
I consider myself fairly good at English but I never dare to say that my English is better than my Chinese or I prefer using English at all time. Learning English or ANY other language is a life-long journey, one can never be perfect with a foreign language. Those Chinese who are boasting their level of English must, I have to say this again, have one too many. Why do you always cite testimonials from drunken Chinese?
This is exactly what you are doing. Learning how to write Chinese is definitely a difficult thing to do for foreigners, but it is NEVER a problem for native Chinese. How do I know?
In America, students have learn so many new words for GRE test, due to the very reason that the sheer number of words in English is overwhelming. In Chinese universities, English courses have such a dominance that college students spend a whole chunk of their time to study it. In contrast, they only take elective courses on Chinese literature or none at all. To become a graduate student, Chinese vocabulary is never ever tested because writing Chinese characters is easy for everyone. Do you get it?
I am surprised that you said you studied linguistics. Not only your training in linguistics failed to teach you have a broad vision on things that are different, but also made you confused with the basic concepts such as word, characters, alphabets and pictographs. Modern Chinese is not a pictographic system. Like English, every character is a symbol, functioning as a signifier of meaning(s).
By the way, I studied linguistics for my master’s, but I am too shy to tell other people about it, because I deem myself not so proficient in it.
The majority of Chinese are satisfied with the current writing system. The difficulties you philosophized on are never a big deal for them. Where do you get the idea it is a good thing for them to change the writing system? Or it is simply good for YOU?
This is one thing we can agree on. Chinese writing system is constantly evolving. And it has transcended boarders to reach Vietnam, Japan and Korea. The latter two countries are still widely using Chinese characters. But it is not evolving to distinction as you imagined.
Don’t let alphabetic system block your eyesight, you really have to learn to accept different options, which includes learning some Chinese.
I just asked one of my Chinese friends, who barely knows English, to comment on your view using one sentence. He said “You are not fish, how do you know the joy of being a fish”, quoting from traditional Chinese literature. This says plenty.
Hate to break it to you, but there is in fact a Chinese translation of Jabberwocky. It was made by Zhao Yuanren/Y.R. Chao/赵元任, the linguist/mad scientist responsible for Gwoyeu Romatzyh, and it’s more than a little bit brilliant.
It’s not a question of numbers, TW. An alphabetic system gives you the capability to learn an almost infinite number of words with comparative ease.
We all base most of our arguments on personal belief and anecdotal evidence. What else do you do? But, by the standards of most laowai, I have met a very large number of Chinese, and these are topics that I like to talk to them about. So, my anecdotal evidence isn’t based on a negligible sample. It is, though, I admit, based on a skewed sample: it contains a disproportionately high element of unusually intelligent people, unusually well-educated people, people who have spent many years overseas and/or worked for foreign companies.
It lowers the tone of the discussion – and tends to discredit your position – if you abuse people (even in jest). Just because Chinese people express views which you may not understand or agree with does not mean that they must be drunk. It’s also not good argumentation to ascribe comments to people which they didn’t make – again, it’s a classic fenqing vice. The Chinese friends are quoted did not brag that their English was better than their Chinese. (It’s not impossible for that to happen, for someone who’s been living overseas a long time and using almost exclusively English. But it is very, very rare.) It was I who rated their English as “really high level”.
Your repeated assertion that learning the Chinese writing system is NEVER a problem for native Chinese is based on….. what? What about all the Chinese that can’t write at all? What about all the Chinese that can write only a fairly small number of characters? What about the Chinese who learned thousands of characters at school, but have forgotten how to write many of them since they left? The fact that Chinese writing ability is not tested at university proves absolutely nothing. If anything, it suggests that there are concerns that students wouldn’t be able to pass a rigorous writing test. It would be very instructive to know what might be the results of thorough testing of the number of characters that can be read and written by students across China at bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral level. Do you have any statistics on this?
You have so far not only omitted to mention your qualification in linguistics, but also to give any evidence of a knowledge of linguistics. Chinese ‘humility’ is a strange thing, indeed.
I’m not really “advocating” this change, simply “predicting” it; I feel it is a natural and inevitable process. And I’m not being “aggressive” about it. It’s just that you perceive it as “aggressive” because it’s not an idea you feel comfortable with.
Froog, I suggest to accurately pinpoint our views, you use “blockquote” html mark to highlight my argument and then debate it.
And you are quoting these people to supporting your view that Chinese is difficult to write? Actually you don’t have to go that far for evidence. Did you forget I told you using too much English and typing in pinyin deteriorated my memory of Chinese characters?
These people, including myself, though I don’t belong to your category of ‘unusually well-educated people’, can not be used to prove that Chinese writing per se is difficult to learn.
You should cite evidence from people who use Chinese ONLY in their daily life, and seek their opinion on our argument. Unfortunately, this is what you cannot do.
If I don’t use English as often as I do now, I will forget to spell many English words as well. It is just psychology. Please don’t complicate it.
Did you forget your earlier remark “A good many of them say that they actually prefer using English to Chinese, because it gives them MORE subtlety and flexibility of expression.” The emphasis is mine. What do you mean by MORE here?
By simple logic, if using one language gives MORE subtlety and flexibility of expression, and it is a PREFERRED way of communication, then either this language is superior (which I disagree) or it is better commanded.
I’d like to see your explanation of this point.
Why do you always complicate matters by making a universal phenomenon a China-specific problem? Replace the words “Chinese” and “China” with “American” and “America”, and run it again. Did you just successfully prove that English is difficult to learn?
You are saying the graduate schools are afraid to give students writing test, because the students “wouldn’t be able to pass a rigorous writing test” on writing Chinese. How ridiculous! Students must pass an English test, which including essay writing, to be accepted into graduate schools. Using your logic, does it mean that the authorities are so confident of the high proficiency in English among Chinese students, and they give these students an EASY test?
Did you also forget what you said earlier “Also, language teaching in China tends to be very, very poor. It’s improved quite a bit in the last decade or so, but it’s still pretty bad.”
You do notice the contradictions in your argument, don’t you?
You know how some people – science teachers, chefs – burn themselves so frequently that they become used to it; their skin gets tougher, and they cease to notice the pain?
In fact, after a while, they forget that they ever felt any pain. They take pride in showing off the skill they have acquired: “Hey, that’s not HOT. Look how easily I can pick it up! No pain at all. Easiest thing in the world.”
I suggest maybe that’s what TW and his Chinese friends are like when they think about learning to write Chinese characters. Easy, easy, easy – not difficult at all.
Though I am not a fish, I can imagine the joy of being a fish.
A fish, however, can never imagine the joy of being a man.
A fish, in fact, can’t even really savour the joy of being a fish for very long, since it has no long-term memory.
This is an excellent metaphor for fenqing. They keep saying the same thing over and over and over again, as if they’ve forgotten that they just said it a couple of minutes ago. And their last line of defence is always…. “You’re not like me, so you can never understand me.” Fish, of course, don’t get this, but…. fish ain’t the only thing that can swim.
Why do you keep labeling me as Fenqing? What you said above applies to your attitude in every sense. How hard is it for you to understand you must learn some Chinese to debate on it?
If the fish metaphor does not ring a bell, how does this English proverb sound to you — the proof of pudding is in the eating. I am expecting more of your imaginations in your future replies.